I don’t carry any more cash than that.

Our fun money amount is higher, but not by a lot. We like having separate accounts because we prefer to use debit cards. We rarely use cash for anything. With debit cards we can track our money easier, we can use our fun money online, we don’t have to head to an ATM each month to get our money, and we don’t have to worry about carrying around or storing cash.

Also, we both often save up our fun money so that we can make larger purchases. For example, I recently used over a month’s fun money to buy some new clothes for winter. I would have felt really strange paying that much in cash.

But then maybe that’s just me. My mom pays for most things in cash and she never seems to have a problem with it. I worry, though, that someone is going to see how much cash she carries and see her as an easy target.

Then, we decided to track our accounts balances each Sunday on an online spreadsheet. That was January and we still “do the numbers” every weekend — and every month we’ve both reduced our debt and increased our savings, including retirement.

We tried making a detailed budget and/or tracking individual expenses. Didn’t work for us. However, with our spreadsheet we can see very quickly how much we can afford and if we’re spending too much.

Another thing that helps (especially with our system) is that we have several bank accounts and we automate everything that we can so that our finances take care of themselves, shuffling money automatically between accounts and paying our regular bills. We each get an “allowance” of fun money into individual checking accounts. All our other expenses come out of our joint checking or savings accounts and we don’t spend out of those without talking to each other unless it’s something small. We also keep a “reserve” buffer in the checking account as an emergency fund and so that we don’t overdraw accidentally (for example, one month our bank’s computers decided to send in our mortgage twice in a week).

It’s like clockwork every month. But when we need to re-prioritize our goals, it’s like pulling teeth to get him to really look at the numbers. He always just says, “I trust you to do the right thing.” I gotta say, that drives me nuts! I want him to give me some input. On the whole though, this system works for us.

Our compromise is he reads my blog posts, hehe, and we discuss our monthly updates in net worth. What went wrong, what went right.